


Wear Joy Like Twice-Mended Flannel

by Yeah_JSmith



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Character Study, Cynicism, F/M, Gen, Nick Learns How to Be Happy, POV Third Person Omniscient, Paradigm Shift, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Prejudice, Social Commentary, Social Dynamics, Swearing, This POV Needs to Die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 10:29:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17958773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeah_JSmith/pseuds/Yeah_JSmith
Summary: In 1994, the guy from Furvana shot himself, and nine-year-old Nick Wilde (who was Very Grown Up, thanks) was no longer a fashion disaster, but proceeded to spend a lifetime cultivating the same smug misery that exponentially raised the price of flannel. 25 years later, he finally understands that the only difference between self-pity and self-aggrandizement is the spelling.That's okay, though, because he's happy.





	Wear Joy Like Twice-Mended Flannel

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a POV experiment (conclusion: it _sucks_ and I'll never use it again), but somehow it became a five-section essay on Why Cynicism Doesn't Work, plus some caustic commentary on how ridiculous it is to fetishize poverty and romanticize suffering, and music got involved because Shakira is a goddess and you can't use flannel as a metaphor without mentioning how deleterious the grunge aesthetic was on dirt-poor kids in the early 90's, and anyway, have a thing.

Mammals don’t know this, because it isn’t important, but Nick was a preemie, and Ruth Wilde’s response to almost losing her son was to coddle him to death. Of course, being Ruth Wilde (née Aspen), her idea of “coddling” was to prepare him for a vile and violent world that would probably hate him on principle. Other children played hide-and-seek; Nick played pickpocket. Other children learned about famous scientists and authors and musicians; Nick learned about the greatest confidence artists of all time. John Wilde, the perennial optimist, had Ideas about this. His ideas were generally ignored, in part because he tried to avoid conflict with those he cared about, and in part because he died when Nick was seven.

(He wasn’t coming back, not ever. It wasn’t _fair.)_

In the two years between John’s death and the disaster that was Junior Ranger Scouts, Nick went from paw-made outfits to old jeans and older flannel shirts, standard thrift-store fare that he only wore comfortably when it ceased to be a financial statement. The price of those shirts went through the roof when Kurt Cobear shot himself, but Nick didn’t see the relationship at the time.

That particular news radiated through the echelons of Nick’s budding social network — which mostly consisted of poor and disenfranchised mammals several years older than Nick himself, all of whom kind of hated the grunge aesthetic for popularizing the clothing that had gotten them bullied for their poverty (and making back-to-school shopping more expensive) — and Nick, who’d always made up for his small stature with big thoughts and a big attitude, was very sad about it. Death was a concept he could hardly process, but he knew from experience that when someone died they could never go home again, and his friends were sad, and he had _always_ had a problem over-empathizing.

So, “Mama,” he said, because he was young enough to call her that unironically and old enough to know she liked it, “you were right. The world _is_ cruel.”

He hardly knew what that meant either. Each individual word made sense, but combined, the thought was a little too complex. The _feeling_ was enough, though. It was a Big Feeling that made him cry, big sobs wracking his small body inside the shabby little house that didn’t feel like home without John Wilde’s outrageous enthusiasm and bad puns.

“I know, baby,” said Ruth, holding him tight in her arms right there where he’d collapsed on the kitchen floor. She didn’t understand where this was coming from — of course she didn’t, she had never really understood her own son, though she loved him from the tips of her ears to the pads of her feet — but she knew how it felt to have a paradigm shift, to see the world as it was instead of how it should be.

John’s death hadn’t managed to take Nick’s smile, though it had made him introspective. The Scouts hadn’t managed to take Nick’s smile, though they had made him jumpy. Later, Ruth would wonder why the suicide of someone whose name Nick hadn’t even known until _afterward_ had managed to do this, but at the moment, she didn’t even know what was wrong.

For the record, Nick _did_ go through a grunge phase forthwith. It lasted two years, from 1994 to 1996, and he refused to acknowledge it as such; he smelled like teen spirit and didn’t know what a libido was, and that suited him (and his contacts, whose singular principle was collectively _oh well, whatever, nevermind)_ just fine. During that time, he actively learned the art of the hustle — not just the bits of trickery and charm that made up a good con, but how and when to get caught _(so sorry, Mrs. Hooferton, he’s usually so sweet, your daughter was bullying him, you know)_ and how to spin his own image _(doesn’t speak up much in class, but when he does, he says such profound things — so smart — with a mother like that…)_

Every negative had a positive. He was an impoverished, undersized, obvious minority with a dead father and a working mother, a kit with a brain the size of a planet in an underfunded school district. At least, that was the spin. By the age of twelve, he proudly identified as a cynic — he’d looked it up in the dictionary at the library, understood the ins and outs of it, wore it like a badge of honor — and made the decision to quit school. School was for losers, mammals who needed to be taught because they were too stupid to learn on their own. Ruth, who had been _denied_ a proper education by circumstance and upbringing, called him a lazy, ungrateful little bastard whose father would be disappointed in him. He left home, and didn’t reconcile with her until after he entered the Zootopia Police Academy.

(She never stopped loving him. It took him twenty years to stop resenting her.)

* * *

Nick and Finnick had exactly one disagreement during their twelve-year partnership. Predictably, it was over clientele.

“Obviously prey should be our marks,” Nick argued, not exactly aggressively, because he didn’t _do_ aggressive, but firmly, because He Was Right. “They’re all worthless.”

“You think everyone is worthless,” Finnick replied blandly.

“But especially prey.”

Finnick made that face Nick hated so much, with the eyebrow and the half-smile and the obvious disdain for Nick’s ideas. Finnick was a decade older and had aged out of a foster system that hated foxes. He’d grown up being called mangy and understanding exactly what it meant. He never let Nick forget that he’d had a comparatively charmed childhood, and if Finnick hadn’t been so goddamn _smart_ below his unenthusiastic exterior and trollish sensibilities, Nick wouldn’t have been able to work with him. The Face was hard to see, because Nick used it — he knew exactly what it meant, even at 20. _Especially_ at 20.

“Kit,” said Finnick, because he referred to Nick that way _almost constantly,_ “life ain’t black and white. You should know that better than you do.”

“Yeah, yeah, shades of gray, whatever,” Nick said dismissively, “but am I wrong? Prey get everything. Why should we-”

“Your mama shoulda spanked you till you saw stars, Nicky, and then done it again a few dozen times for good measure. I have half a mind to do it myself right here and now.”

(Finnick was full of little nuggets like that. Until Nick, he’d never known a life without violence. He wanted to protect this stupid, immature, _brilliant_ little kit from the kind of shit the world threw at real criminals, like Finnick had been before.)

Nick sulked for a while in self-righteous fury only muted by his very real fear that Finnick would _actually do it,_ and when he wasn’t pissy anymore he asked, without the attitude this time, “Why do you stand up for them? I don’t get it. What have prey ever done for you?”

“It ain’t what “prey” done for me. You’re still young, Kit, and so’m I, but when you live the life I lived...you learn fuckin’ _truth._ Ain’t prey against predator, never has been. Quit feelin’ sorry for yourself. I’ll treat you like a grownup when you act like one.”

It would be a long, long time before Nick fully understood that lesson, and it would come in the form of Idris Bogo, a government official whose blind prejudice again Judy Hopps — _prey,_ the _ultimate_ prey — nearly got them both killed. And even then, it would take him months to acknowledge it.

Finnick, being Finnick, would be so fuckin’ proud, and never say a word.

* * *

Growing up hustler meant that Nick was not surprised when the market crashed in 2008. It had been an inelegant, predictable sort of thing — a top-down disaster that missed him largely because his little games were cash-only and based on sensible, consumable goods. Preparing legal documents was a fan favorite (he could get someone divorced for half the price of an attorney using only downloadable documents and some slick retainer language), and of course, ice cream was a big seller.

Nick was insufferably smug. While every other 25-year-old experienced the shock and horror of watching the economy crash down around them and their dreams disappear into mountains of crushing student debt and suddenly-devalued degrees, he got to say _I told you so._ And sure, maybe he was homeless, and on the shit list of Zootopia’s biggest and baddest crime boss, and generally unhappy, but he stood strong in his superiority nonetheless. Take that, Everybody Else. Nick had been right since childhood. Nothing meant anything, dreams were worthless, and the only way to get through life was to look out for yourself.

Engineers killed themselves. Nick made a killing. Take that, Mom.

There was, Nick was convinced despite Finnick’s best efforts, a quiet dignity in the kind of suffering he endured. The world was against him because he was a fox, and because he was poor, and because he was 24 — part of a generation who had been awarded “participation trophies” they hadn’t wanted, and were later berated for such receipt, as though they’d had any control over what their shitty parents had done — and because his marketable skills weren’t the _right_ marketable skills, and because because his species was small, _and and and._ There was, Nick was convinced, strength in self-pity, a statement to society, _you did this to me._ And so—

Nick Wilde suffered, and he took pride in it.

Individual instances of speciesism had waned since he’d been born. It was still institutional, still systemic, but Nick didn’t really fear for his life, as such. Police had bigger fish to fry _(better targets,_ he’d often say snidely to Finnick, whose default setting had become irritable apathy anyway) and the culture of careless microaggression was omnipresent, but the more shit heaped upon him, the more self-righteous he could be. Take that, Society. Everything was birdshit and he was still standing, so who was laughing now?

The economy went downhill. Nick stayed right where he’d always been. _He was better,_ and yeah, society kind of hated him. He got them back, made sure he deserved it.

* * *

In his late-20’s, flannel made a comeback. Nick had Ideas about this, but time had tempered his, well, _temper,_ so he wrapped himself in comfortable cynicism and switched to Tommy Bapawma shirts and silk ties. It was delightfully marketable: eye-catching, indicative of money, the kind of outfit that said _I don’t need to sell to you, I just want to._ That was useful. Mammals tended to trust money, as obscene as that was. Nick was smug about that, too; he was smarter. He knew the ones with the most money had come by it on the backs of suckers who would never know they’d been taken advantage of.

This time around, it wasn’t poor kits who wore flannels from the thrift store, it was yuppies on their off-hours who’d bought it new online, fake breast pockets and nice buttons that all matched because they hadn’t been added post-purchase. Not that Nick had expected anything else from such a fake, plastic, consumerist society.

Since class divide had been a thing — or, since there had been written documentation of it in the form of fiction, anyway — youngish brats had romanticized poor-ness, made an art form of their mockery. Upper-crust trust-fund idiots wore shawls and scarves and Instagrowled themselves in faraway places with hashtags like #VulpesSoul and #FreeSpirit. Charles Lickens had written about the struggles of destitution in such a way that idiotic kits were _charmed_ by it. Poverty tourism existed. These rich shitbags had no idea that they were spitting on the real problems of real mammals, and Nick hated them for it…

...But, again, how could he not be smug? He was better. He was smarter. He knew things they didn’t, and every time someone bought what he was selling, he felt more and more secure. Every time one of the #VulpesSoul folks talked to him about the kind of moveable house they were totally gonna build, he grinned and gave them bogus tips based on his mother’s horror stories.

Like, “You should park in Arcadia in the dead of winter; it’s so beautiful.”

Like, “You can’t really live the Vulpes life unless you shed your whole identity.”

Like, “It’s worth it. Every minute of homelessness, feeling like you don’t belong, wondering if you’ll be able to eat next week, worrying about whether or not you’ll be able to track down your birth certificate and social security card...it’s all worth it for those pure little moments of freedom.”

Nick tolerated the flannel, because at least it wasn’t _that._ The statement was annoying, but ultimately inoffensive. And if they wanted to look like lesbians who’d never left the late-90’s and played soulful songs on their secondpaw acoustic guitars, well, that was their decision, wasn’t it?

* * *

Judy Hopps wore flannel with buttons that matched, but were lovingly reattached post-purchase — twice-mended and comfortable, just like Nick remembered. She shook her hips to Gazelle and couldn’t decide if Furvana’s lyrics had been ironic. She laughed at horror movies and hated sitcoms and could hardly work a smartphone, although she _could_ diagnose and fix your car engine in a hot minute. She was a tiny miracle, but she had no idea, because Nick (and the rest of the thinking world, or at least, the minute portion of the world who knew and cared who she even was) preferred to call her a menace instead. She was brash, aggressive, unable to accept the limits society tried to force on her, and she was going to get herself killed someday if Nick didn’t look out for her. Watch her back or whatever.

But aside from a new career, she also offered him a way out of what had become an untenable mindset. It wasn’t the product of some deep, sophisticated lecture. It wasn’t a near-death experience. There was no scary hospital stay, no declaration of undying love, no loss of a family member or treasured friend. It was an annoyed comment, thrown over her shoulder three weeks after Dawn Bellwether’s arrest, when she was doing her physical therapy exercises and he was making fun of her for it.

“I don’t know why you try so hard to get everybody to dislike you,” she said, grunting as she almost fell and caught herself on the edge of her desk. “There’s a lot to like. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you hated yourself.”

And the illusion of superiority — just like that, without any warning — shattered.

If Judy was “It’s not so bad, because it could have been worse,” Nick was “It should have been better, and it wasn’t.” Neither of them necessarily _denied_ the shit that had happened to them — and neither were pessimists, as much as Nick wanted that to be the case — but in building his own hype, Nick had grown to loathe the mammals who behaved as he behaved. He had torn down Judy while hypocritically hating the mammals who had torn him down. He despised the gullible dipshits who _bought what he sold._ How could he say with a straight face that he liked himself?

(How could she say with a straight face that there was anything _to_ like?)

_-fue una tortura, perderte-_

Judy sang along to Gazelle’s old pop hit as she tried again to do some controlled heel-raises, probably unaware of Nick quietly freaking out on her bed. This black-thumbed daughter of farmers probably had no clue that she’d just shaken his world, because she liked herself, and she liked him, and she couldn’t possibly understand the impact that 22 years of mental gymnastics might have on someone. She’d only been alive for 24.

Judy did know, though. He wasn’t the only one who’d tied himself into knots trying to fit into a world built for someone else. He wasn’t the only one who’d been told his dreams were worthless time and time again. He wasn’t the only one who’d had to deal with systemic prejudice, with disrespect, with insulting stereotypes about everything from his intelligence to his presumed profession. The biggest, most glaring difference between them was that Judy hadn’t given up, and she was proud of that, and she wasn’t going to let Nick get away with pretending everything was okay when it so clearly wasn’t.

Nick had made a lifestyle out of being right. For some reason, in Judy’s little shithole apartment in Happytown, he felt really good about being wrong. It felt like freedom, and that was _terrifying,_ but she pivoted on her good foot and smiled at him, and he knew he wasn’t alone.

 

Three years later, he caught Ruth helping Judy make him a cake. Ruth looked put-together, as always, and Judy somehow had managed to get frosting all over her old, pilling, baby pink flannel shirt and blue leggings. It wasn’t Nick’s birthday, or a holiday, or any other special occasion; Judy just wanted to show him that she loved him, and Ruth wanted to be part of her son’s life, and the last of Nick’s hard, cynical shell finally washed away. The answer had never been isolation, and he almost couldn’t believe he had managed to convince himself otherwise.

The cake tasted terrible. Judy was pleased with herself anyway, and even as a sudden rainstorm cut their picnic short, Nick couldn’t help but smile and smile and smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Nick is fucking fabulous. I legit cannot come up with words to express how much I love his character.
> 
> Music quotes from Nirvana's _Smells Like Teen Spirit,_ because I'm a little shit who is easily amused, and from Shakira's _La Tortura,_ because that song is awesome.


End file.
